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Saturday, October 25, 2014

Google Form Submission Notifications

Google forms are a really convenient tool to collect data from students, and teachers with ease. It's nice to be able to present a form online for viewers to provide you with information and have it all magically organized in a Google Sheet. Where you then have the freedom to manipulate whichever way you choose. This might be manipulations directly in the spreadsheet, or manipulations through Fusion Tables. (on a side note, if you haven't tried fusion tables for you data, do yourself a favor and check out this tool, it is a serious time saver.)

Recently I had some colleagues ask me if there was a script I could write, or one I could direct them to that would send them an email notification of a form submission. While my head swelled an enormous amount at the fact they thought I could scribble out a form script on demand, I pulled myself together and brought to their attention, a small overlooked feature in a linked Google Form Sheet. Here is the quick and easy way to get notifications of form submissions, or any changes made to your Google Form Spreadsheet.

1) First, create a form that will collect a lot of data that you would require some notification. This is important. You don’t' want to flood your gmail with unimportant notifications of a form submission.

2) Once the form is created, link a Google Sheet to the form, and navigate to that sheet. It doesn't matter if there are any submissions yet.

3) On the newly linked Form, click Tools>Notification Rules...

4) From here, you are presented with a pop-up window with a lot of different choices. Choose the one that best fits your need and just like that, you will now be alerted to the traffic on your form.

5) Optional- once you set a notification rule; create a gmail filter to redirect all those new notification into one spot for better organization.